Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Being a big fan of Stephen Wolfram (he’s at or close to the top of my “people I wish I was” list), I’ve been looking forward to wolframalpha, or practically any other tool he comes up with.

That said, I see the point of critics who’ve said it could have used a lot more work before a wide public release. Capacity and availability appears to have been poorly planned, as much of the weekend, I got “unavailable – no connections available” from it. As best I can tell, it works pretty well if you’re willing to work with it, and educate yourself in its various ways of replying, which are sometimes awesomely clear, other times pretty much straight Mathematica, and frequently bizarre guesses at what you were trying to ask.

A couple examples I tried were “solve V = 4*pi/3*((r+d)^3 -r^3) for d”, how thick a spherical shell of a given outer radius must be to have a given volume, which I’d just solved myself in about 15 minutes using old-fashioned human algebra. It took a few seconds, and (clicking on “show steps”), is as clearly explained as by a good teacher. Cranking it up 4 dimensions to a 7-sphere, “solve V = 2*pi/315*((r+d)^7 -r^7) for d” returns output saying, to people who know Mathematica “use a numeric approximation”, which is fine if you know Mathematica and that there’re no general solutions to degree 7 polynomials, but pretty opaque if you don’t. Slip up slightly in your notation, and you’ll get weird results, ie: “solve V = k((r+d)^7 -r^7) for d”.

Try “Schwarzschild radius”, and it give you an equation and a nifty calculator to input masses into, but no handy reference of common masses to try – nice, but not superb.

It responds neatly to a simple “how are you?”, but lacks the pre-programmed pith of the ca 2000 “Jeeves” version of ask.com, which would reply to question like “are you gay?” with “none of your business”, “I prefer the term ‘jovial’”, or “sometimes silence is the best answer”.

In short, wolframalpha show promise, and I’d be fascinated to know how it’s working, but I don’t think in its present form it’ll steal much traffic from google, hyperphysics, or wikikpedia.